Editorial: Creative suburbanites keep the spirit of doing one's part alive
During World War II, we canceled baseball, rationed food, scavenged for scrap metal to build armaments, put women in factories for the first time to do that work and planted 20 million Victory gardens to help feed a hungry nation.
Everyone did their part.
Today, we fight a different kind of war. But the spirit to do one's part lives on.
We see evidence of it every day, despite the challenges of needing to stay away from one another.
People are showing their support to medical workers with pizza deliveries and meal trains. Employee cars parked at a suburban hospital were plastered with notes of thanks and encouragement.
Sure, we've witnessed a run on hand sanitizer and toilet paper for weeks now and some profiteering with basic-needs products online. But those people are the exception, not the rule.
More common are neighborhoods we've seen band together to shop for people with medical conditions that make it imprudent for them even to out to buy necessities.
We've seen stores open exclusively for seniors early in the morning so they're subjected to less human contact.
We've seen food service businesses forced to close donate enormous amounts of their stock to food pantries.
We've seen people innovate to find ways to bring a sense of normalcy to an entirely abnormal situation.
We've seen drive-through birthday parties and drive-through baby showers and a wedding in a mostly empty church livestreamed to hundreds.
Every day, we see signs of hope, small kindnesses and a sort of togetherness that might have seemed impossible before a couple of weeks ago.
Perhaps the biggest and most organized effort to help comes from the suburban sewing community where several groups are hard at work assembling thousands of face masks for health care workers and others.
Anna Haley Fielder of Antioch is one of the crafty people doing her part. "Hospitals are saying, 'We'll take as many as you can make,'" she said.
"It's just dire. People are desperate for any type of protection."
It important to note that many hospitals are not accepting these masks because health officials say they are incapable of blocking COVID-19. And the cotton masks' ability to add a layer of protection is untested.
But with medical grade masks at a premium, health care workers are having to reuse them - and those who are making the cotton masks believe they can be worn over medical-grade masks to extend their life.
All of these efforts remind us that we're all in this together, even when we're forced to be apart.